HUMANITY and compassion have not featured prominently in the opening weeks of the 1997 election campaign. Indeed, rather grotesque images of Britain have greeted this new year.
Tony Blair set the tone. The man who is credited with the revival of Christian socialism rather proudly told the Big Issue magazine that he never gave to beggars on the streets. Ever the king of the soundbite, the Labour leader announced himself in favour of New York style "zero tolerance" of street crime. And for all his subsequent explanations, the resulting headlines damned together the variety of hapless, helpless, abused, forsaken and seriously ill who inhabit Britain's cardboard cities.
Not to be outdone, a Home Office Minister denounced the beggars on the streets as an "embarrassment" and "a disgrace". David Maclean pronounced them mostly Scots, who chose to sleep on the streets. The only thing he ever gave them, he announced equally proudly, was a piece of his mind.
The Minister had grasped at only half a point. I remembered visiting a Salvation Army hostel for the homeless a while back, gagging at the institutional smells which clung to me for hours, and which inclined some - it was high summer to take their chances on a bench along the Embankment.
Mr Maclean had fired his salvo during the coldest days, so far, this winter. And a fellow Scot, Sir David Steel, was withering in his reaction. If the Minister thought homeless Scots or any others were sleeping in shop doorways in these conditions through choice, then he was a fool.
A fool, presumably, who has never talked to psychiatrists from the central London hospitals who have surveyed the homeless on their patch, and found disturbing numbers of them mentally ill, forced on to the streets by the much vaunted policy of "care in the community".
But then, in the current climate, it might be thought foolish - hopelessly bleeding heart and liberal - to fret over much at the news of a dying man, a prisoner, left handcuffed to his bed in a cancer hospice.
We heard ministers last year explain why pregnant women prisoners might need to be shackled even during labour. We heard Home Office minister Ann Widdecombe last week explain that these really are matters of operational guidelines, little to do with politics. Over the years doubtless we've become immune to the spectacle of men and women, young and old, huddling in the doorways of famous shops as we make our way into the Savoy or Simpson's in the Strand.
But the story of remand prisoner Geoffrey Thomas (25), who was unchained only three hours before his death, confirmed that the capacity for raw anger and indignation still exists.
Mr Thomas, from Mid Glamorgan, was taken ill at Cardiff jail on December 23rd and admitted to the city's University Hospital where he was found to be in the final stages of stomach cancer. He was transferred to the Marie Curie cancer hospice on New Year's Day. But despite pleas from doctors attending him, he was kept manacled and two prison officers remained with him in a private room at all times.
The medical director who cared for him said: "I think it's desperately sad, and I felt very sorry for the prison officers there because they were in a very difficult position. Mr Thomas couldn't have run anywhere. He needed help to sit up in bed."
Stephen Shaw, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "I find it almost incredible. This was an appalling and abhorrent way to treat someone in the last hours of their life. It happened because the prison service is so worried about what might happen if a prisoner were to escape that common humanity goes out of the window, and security becomes the be all and end all. It is difficult to think of a more degrading way to spend the last hours of your life, being shackled like an animal."
And some of that anger and indignation surely will spread its reassurance around Princess Diana as she finds herself under attack for daring to support the Red Cross campaign for a worldwide ban on anti personnel mines. Yesterday's headlines screamed the alleged concern of unnamed ministers that Dianahad become "a loose cannon" and was "ill advised" to step so publicly into the political arena.
There have been plenty enough loose cannons on display in the past 10 days. And they haven't been with the princess on her humanitarian mission to Angola.